SOUL-UTIONS TO PAIN
The archetypical story about pain is recorded in the book of Job, who experiences horrible tribulations. Job's friends try to give him answers to explain his pain, but Job is not satisfied with any of their answers. In the end, G-d Himself speaks to Job and gives him resolve.
Job's friends tell him that there is no such thing as pain without justice. This means that when a person goes through pain it is simply the fulfillment of justice. Pain is not haphazard or accidental. In some way-even if we cannot possibly fathom why-we have deserved our pain. But Job does not accept this answer.
Maimonides, the great Torah sage known as the Rambam, says that this answer is actually the true position of Jewish tradition. In fact, when the Rambam discusses the meaning of "pain" or "suffering," he quotes the verse in the book of Job recording the answer of Job's friend who said that there is no pain...
What do you do when you can’t do what you want to do, and what you have to do, you really don’t want to do?
Sound confusing? That was actually our reality during Covid, as the world turned upside down and we all found ourselves suddenly, in an entirely new reality.
It reminds me of the story of my cousin, Aryeh Yakont z”l, who was a Holocaust survivor. His family lived in Antwerp and he and his brother Ephraim were just boys when the Nazis occupied Belgium. Very quickly, things went from bad to worse, their father Betzalel was taken away by the Gestapo, and their mother Shoshana (my Aunt) went into hiding with her two small boys in the house of a kind Christian neighbor. Eventually, as things got worse, they had to stay hidden and quiet, all day, in a tiny hidden room the size of a closet, with no windows, for two years before they were eventually...
How Can an Argument Bring People Closer?
The Unexpected Sound of Spirituality
Imagine someone who has spent months in silent meditation, immersed in peaceful introspection. Now, bring them into a beit midrash, the heart of Jewish learning. What would they expect? A sanctuary of calm, quiet reflection?
Instead, they’d be shocked. The room is alive with intensity—voices rising, hands gesturing, students leaning into each other, arguing over a passage in the Talmud. At first glance, it looks more like a heated dispute than a spiritual experience. How can such passionate disagreement be part of a path to wisdom?
This, however, is the Jewish way of learning. Torah study isn’t a solo practice of silent contemplation. It’s a dynamic exchange, a pursuit of truth through rigorous discussion and debate.
A War of Ideas, Not of Egos
In Judaism, learning isn’t just about absorbing information—it’s about engaging with it. The Talmud describes Torah study as milchamta shel Torah, the “battle of Torah.” But this battle isn’t about ego or winning an argument....
Sometimes, it's that one extra word that makes all the difference. It was only a fraction of a moment of my time in the army, but it was a lesson I never forgot, though to this day I am undecided as to whether I agree with it.
I was desperate to get a day off; we were still in basic training, and I had barely been in the army three months, but my folks were landing at the airport the next afternoon, and I was hoping my commanders would give me a break as I had not seen head or hair of any family in the two months since I had joined up.
My folks had done me the enormous favor of landing on a Thursday afternoon, which was the best possible day of the week for a tank crewman to get extra leave. Thursday was "Tipul She'vui" day, which meant the weekly servicing and cleaning of every last inch of every...
Successful People Are Unaccomplished
Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you a holy, a day of solemn rest to the Lord. (Exodus 35:2)
During the forty years that the Israelites wandered in the desert they carried with them a portable temple referred to as the Tabernacle or the Mishkan. The creative acts that are forbidden on Shabbat are those acts similar to the skills that went into building or assembling the Mishkan. The Talmud outlines 39 different categories of such creative acts that are forbidden to do on Shabbat. They represent our ultimate power of creativity which is to build a temple that accommodates the presence of G-d on earth. Of course we know that G-d does not literally dwell in the Mishkan, however, the Mishkan symbolizes our ability to serve G-d and infuse every moment and every place with the presence of G-d. In other words, the greatest accomplishment of a human being is to serve to make manifest G-d’s presence...
A number of years ago at a parlor meeting of the coalition for the Israeli Soldiers missing in action, someone stood up to share a few words about a close friend of his with whom he had both studied and gone to war: Yehuda Katz.
Yehuda Katz, a soldier who, along with Zack Baumel and Tzvi Feldman, has been missing in action since the battle of Sultan Yaakov in June of 1982, studied in Yeshivat Kerem Be’Yavneh and has been missing now for over twenty years.
At the beginning of the Lebanon War on the first Sunday night in June of 1982, they received word in the Yeshiva that buses would be coming to take the boys up North to fight. Kerem Be’Yavneh is one of a number of very special Yeshivot (Academies for higher Jewish learning) whose boys combine their yeshiva studies with army service in Israeli Combat units. In addition to their regular reserve duty and studies in yeshiva, whenever...
Unmasking Nature:
G-d’s Love is Here and Now
According to Jewish Tradition, as soon as the Hebrew month of Adar begins we must increase our joy because the miracle of the Purim Story happened on that month. Purim celebrates the salvation of the Jews in the year 357 BCE from the wicked Haman’s scheme to exterminate all the Jewish men, women and children living in the Persian Empire, which meant all the Jews in the world at that time. In the Purim story, however, there were no miraculous divine interventions. There were no supernatural plagues and no splitting of any seas. In fact, G-d’s name is not even mentioned once in the entire Purim story recorded in the Book of Esther (Megillat Esther).
Although the holiday of Purim is celebrated only on the 14th of the month of Adar, and in some places on the 15th, the whole month is identified with greater joy. Purim is so abundant with joy that its celebration overflows into the entire month,...
Sabra and Shatilla; for most of us, the names of these Arab refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon evoke images of controversy and confusion as the sites where Christian Phalange soldiers massacred over seven hundred civilians: men, women and children in September of 1982. And most people will associate this controversy with the question of whether Israeli troops controlling the area should have or even could have prevented these terrible events.
But for the men of the 202nd battalion of the Israeli paratroopers, including my older brother, these names and that time recall a very different memory. I only got the full story a few months later, when my brother and I managed to get together for Shabbat in our rented apartment in Jerusalem. Late Friday night, I awakened to strange, muffled sounds coming from his room, and discovered him, in the midst of a nightmare. The sounds of his cries were muffled because in the midst of his dream he had...
The Gift of Giving:
Love’s Secret Service
In this week’s Torah Portion we are commanded to bring pure oil to the tabernacle to light the Menorah (candelabra).
“And you (Moses) shall command the children of Israel, that they bring to you pure olive oil beaten for the light, to cause a lamp to burn continually.” (Exodus 27:20)
The Midrash, which part of Jewish Oral Tradition, asks an obvious question. The entire world is illuminated by G-d’s splendor and yet He tells the Jewish people to bring oil to light the Menorah before Him? The Midrash answers that G-d desires the works of your hands.
How can we understand that G-d desires the works of our hand?
How can G-d want something from us?
What can we give G-d?
Does G-d lack anything that we can provide?
The Kabbalah teaches that G-d created the world to give us goodness and yet it seems from the Midrash that G-d is not looking to give but really wants to receive. How...
In 1860, a relatively unknown one-term congressman (who had practiced law in the prairie towns of Illinois) named Abraham Lincoln stunned the country by prevailing over three prominent rivals—William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates—to win the Republican nomination for President.
But even more surprising was what Lincoln did after being elected President: He appointed all three rivals to his cabinet—Seward as secretary of state, Chase as secretary of the treasury, and Bates as attorney general.
Reading up on Abraham Lincoln, one discovers that this was not an astute political move; rather, it was simply who he was.
In fact, even his enemies often became his friends. To quote David Chamber Mearns:
“Enemies seemed to be potential friends to Abraham Lincoln. When British writer
Edward Dicey was introduced to the president as one of his enemies, Lincoln’s
response was: “I did not know I had any enemies”. (Largely Lincoln pg. 93)
The same Dicey, in...
